Saturday 19 March 2011

Mysore, India





19th March 2011

India returns

It has been hard these past few days. Not real hardship like so many millions of people face here every day, just hard for five very lucky people who’ve had the time of their lives, waiting to go home.
Stuck in their hotel room, it’s air-conditioned, it has a TV, it even has a huge supermarket around the corner. A teenager with his head in Facebook, a 10 year old on crutches, a 6 year old wanting toys or someone his own age to play with. A middle aged father with his head in the future and a mother trying to hold it all together. Frayed nerves kind of hard.

Apart from a family of monkeys on the ledge outside our window who later ran up and down the stairs of the hotel, old India hasn’t really intervened.

We went to Mysore palace today in an attempt to pass the time. We stopped at a restaurant famous for it’s Veg Thali. Delicious food and fantastically grumpy waiters. The kids ate nothing. The trip for them is over, no more Indian food.
They are on strike.

At the Palace, it was hard for Edie. It took ages to borrow a wheelchair and in the end there were just too many stairs for it to be much fun. We came back to the hotel to read, to go online, to pass the time.

Then the drums started. Distant at first, then louder and LOUDER, building and building. Firecrackers and chanting, we could see them through the monkey bars from our window. We went downstairs to look. Just Rach , Edie and me at first but when Rach saw all the kids dancing, she went to get Will.

Teenage boys in orange scarves were going crazy, banging drums. A man was balancing a huge 20 foot colourful decoration on his head and dancing his own strange, slow prance down the street.

Then the Trumpton band reappeared. Old-style station master red hats and
short-trousered uniforms with tubas, cymbals, trumpets and big bass drum.

Then the float, driven by a bored-looking man with twenty children aboard and a  massive flashing neon flower as a backdrop. Following the jeep were 8 men holding fluorescent tube lamps, all connected by electrical wire . In front of them , 2 girls with huge marigold garlands on their head being led through the procession by a man who kept unrolling a carpet for the girls to step onto.

The bands were all beating out their own tunes at the same time. As loud as they could. “They are going like the clappers” Will shouts out to me. I can hardly hear him above the din.. Chaos, confusion and delirious dancers all hammering away.

I filmed this madness with Will holding my other hand. At the top of the hotel steps
I saw Edie with her crutches, not really able to join in but still here, still taking part. I was very moved. India had come back I felt, one last time, for us. For me.

Will and I stepped out, holding hands, I was worried he might get swept away by it all. We moved through the crowd, dodging the fluorescent tube men and their cables, the cow shit, the random boulders, paving slabs, trenches with open sewage.

The delirium seemed to go up a notch. Now there were more elaborate fireworks, rockets. We found ourselves outside a temple, seething with people inside and the girls with marigolds being escorted out. Thali trays with candles came out, blessings were made. Fervour and intensity over so many faces. The beautiful women were somehow sidelined, distant and apart.

“Which country” I was asked for the umpteenth time. The man tried to explain what this was in aid of. Not the festival of Holi, he said but the Matas or was it Martyrs?? Does it matter??

Finally Will and I pulled away..
We walked past a musical instrument shop, went in, had a look around. It was just me excited, trying to hold onto the moment again.

Outside again, I gave a beggar the 5 rupees I had in my pocket, it seemed pathetic and miserly. He turned it over in his hand.

It was not India that had come back but we who had left India too soon.
I will miss her…………….



………………Meanwhile Louis is busy online, organising an ASDA home delivery.
Chicken Pad Thai is on the menu.

Wednesday 16 March 2011

Mysore, India


17th March 2011

Mysore Foot!

Edie:


On Saturday, we came out of the restaurant that we had just eaten in and got into a rickshaw. We drove around a roundabout  in the centre of Mysore and another Rickshaw cut across us. Our driver accidently crashed into him and our whole rickshaw tipped over onto its side. I was sitting on mum’s lap and my foot got caught and I think it was crushed by the rickshaw. Apart from a couple of bumps and bruises, the rest of us the family were fine.
After two visits to the hospital, Mysore foot’s in a cast!! It is a sprain not a break and I walk around with crutches now.  It sometimes hurts but I’m on the mend. 








Wednesday 9 March 2011

Mysore, India



9th March

Will:

We went to the Train Museum in Mysore today . There were steam trains there. The fire and coal mixed together to drive the engines.  In the cabin part of the train it was very black and dusty because of all the coal passing from the engine. We could go into the train cabin, in the front of the carriage.  We went in every single one of the train’s cabins. One of them belonged to the Maharani. She was the wife of the local King. They don’t have the Kings like him here anymore so it’s kind of like the Queen’s carriage.

They made a car ,into a car that can go along the train track! It carries inspectors who check if the track is good or not. We went inside the back where the inspectors get out when they need to inspect the railways.

And in the garden we found really big butterflies and they were really colourful with spots and mixed colours. Then we went over to the little train but we didn’t ride on the little train because the driver had gone for lunch.We will do it later or tomorrow




Gokarna, India



Monday 28th February  to 6th March 2011

Edie:
This is a holy town called Gokarna. We are staying for the festival of Shivaratri. We are staying in a flat above a shop which backs onto the temple, it is comfy but very hot. We go to the beach every day by rickshaw.

All the guesthouses around here are pretty cheap because pilgrims come from all over India to watch the Shivaratri going on. Pilgrims are people that give their lives or part of their lives to religion.

On the last day of  Shivaratri the pilgrims, and some tourists, threw bananas at the chariot while there were people inside. A man in a balcony of a house above us was spitting out paan (chewing tobacco) and it landed on Mum. Our friend went up to complain and we ended up sitting with him in his house watching everyone throwing bananas at the chariots. It was so busy in the small town, there must have been thousands of people.

150 men pulled the enormous chariots up the street by ropes.  It was so hot and the chariots were so heavy that the wheels made dents in the tarmac road!